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Comment by airstrike | Hacker News Reader

Spreadsheet is a form of programming, so you can build anything there.

Spreadsheets traditionally don’t support iteration (loops) or recursion. In Excel you had to go the VBA route for actual programming.

In my hands they do

That is the spirit.

In the distant future:

    $ ./myapp.xlsx --port 8080
    My App listening on port 8080
    Loaded 1337 rows

The future is now with Microsoft Excel Web Services, which is part of SharePoint.

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepoint/dev/general-dev...

In other hands, I have seen Excel spreadsheet hundred-products pricelists become a freaking tangle of merged cells, multiple rows for products, spelling mistakes, multiple spaces everywhere, and price cells hand-formatted. And I had to export the contents to machine readable .csv...

That sounds like a nightmare to untangle. On the other hand, it would be very satisfying to go from the original pricelists to a new, cleaned format!

Not a common opinion, but one I happen to share.

Let’s see an HTTP server in an Excel sheet.

That's a disingenuous take. You could write one, but it won't be allowed to connect to anything other than itself because Excel doesn't give it the network stack or IO it needs. Unless you use VBA, of course.

See https://spreadsheets-are-all-you-need.ai/index.html

Maybe just me but seeing side by side "spreadsheets are all you need" and ".ai" seem to be somewhat uh... competing claims.

It's a play on "Attention is all you need", the seminal AI paper.

The author of that website implemented GPT-2 inference on Excel

Fairly sure Excel can get access to the entire .NET runtime.

Plus, someone made a MOV only compiler, soon...

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/office/client-developer/ex...

Calling user-defined functions (UDFs) from a worksheet is as simple as calling built-in functions: You enter the function via a cell formula.

I didn’t check their claim, but https://github.com/michaelneu/webxcel:

“Webxcel creates a full-fledged RESTful web backend from your Microsoft Excel workbooks. It is written in 100% plain Visual Basic macros and comes with a lot of handy tools to help you build the next big thing.”

Ha! Sure beats the pure bash HTTP server. ;-)

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